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Review Summary

This is a straightforward film of the 1969 play, a jailhouse drama by Plinio Marcos, which was banned by the Brazilian government for twenty years. In the story, a naive young middle-class white boy (Marcos Winter) is arrested following a bar fight, and it put into a jail cell with six hardened criminals. The only thing they ever cooperate on in the whole film is to get together to rape the young man (the film title, Barrela, is a Brazilian slang word for sexual violence). Aside from that, during their whole time in jail their relationships are a seething mass of shifting alliances between sworn enemies, with the hapless, brutalized lad caught in the middle of their schemes. ~ Clarke Fountain, Rovi